Glue for Feature Discovery

By Priya Shankar

Every product team reaches a point where nobody can confidently answer "what does our product actually do?" A feature inventory tool solves this by crawling your codebase, mapping every capability, and producing a living catalog that stays current as code changes. Glue was built for exactly this problem. Instead of relying on stale spreadsheets or tribal knowledge locked inside individual engineers' heads, Glue reads your source code and produces a structured inventory of every feature your product offers today.

This matters more than most teams realize. Without a reliable feature inventory, product managers guess during competitive analysis. Sales teams promise capabilities that may or may not exist. Support staff route tickets based on assumptions rather than facts. The cost compounds quietly until a major decision goes wrong.

Most organizations attempt feature tracking through one of three methods: a wiki page someone updates quarterly, a product requirements document that reflects intention rather than reality, or a spreadsheet that a departing PM started and nobody maintained.

None of these approaches work at scale. Codebases grow faster than documentation. Engineers ship improvements without updating any external record. Features get deprecated in code but live on in marketing materials. Entire modules get refactored, splitting one feature into three or merging three into one, and no document captures the change.

The result is a persistent gap between what your product actually does and what your organization believes it does. This gap creates friction everywhere. Product managers spend hours in Slack asking engineers "do we support X?" before writing specs. Sales teams lose deals because they cannot articulate the full scope of the product. Competitive analysis relies on incomplete internal knowledge compared against competitor marketing claims.

Manual feature audits are expensive. A typical audit requires pulling two or three senior engineers off their work for a week or more. By the time the audit is complete, it is already falling behind. And the next audit will require the same effort all over again.

The fundamental issue is that features live in code, but the people who need to know about features do not read code. Bridging this gap requires automation.

Glue connects directly to your code repositories and applies AI analysis to map your product's capabilities. The process works in three stages.

First, Glue parses your codebase to identify functional boundaries. It recognizes API endpoints, UI components, service modules, database schemas, and configuration files. Rather than treating code as undifferentiated text, Glue understands the structural patterns that indicate distinct capabilities.

Second, Glue clusters related code into feature groups. A single feature might span a React component, an API route, a database migration, and a background job. Glue traces these connections and groups them into coherent features that match how users and product teams think about capabilities.

Third, Glue generates plain-language descriptions for each discovered feature. These descriptions include what the feature does, which parts of the codebase implement it, when it was last modified, and how much code supports it. The output is a feature inventory that anyone on the team can read and search.

This process runs continuously. As your team ships new code, Glue updates the inventory automatically. When an engineer merges a pull request that adds a new API endpoint or modifies an existing workflow, the feature map reflects the change within hours rather than months.

Glue also identifies features that may be partially built, abandoned, or duplicated. If two different parts of your codebase implement similar functionality, Glue flags the overlap. If a feature was started but never connected to any user-facing route, Glue notes it as incomplete.

Teams using Glue for feature discovery gain three concrete outcomes.

A living feature catalog. Instead of a static spreadsheet, you get a continuously updated inventory that reflects your actual codebase. Product managers can search it before writing specs. Sales teams can reference it during calls. Support teams can use it to verify whether a customer request describes existing functionality or a genuine gap.

Faster competitive analysis. When you know exactly what your product does, comparing it against competitors becomes straightforward. You stop relying on memory and start working from facts. The feature inventory becomes the foundation for gap analysis, roadmap planning, and positioning work.

Reduced engineering interruptions. Every question a PM asks an engineer about existing capabilities represents a context switch. Multiply that across a team of product managers asking a team of engineers, and the cost is significant. Glue eliminates the most common category of these interruptions by making feature knowledge self-serve.

The feature inventory also serves as a foundation for other Glue capabilities. Architecture understanding, effort estimation, and spec writing all benefit from having an accurate map of what already exists in your codebase.

Organizations that adopt Glue for feature discovery typically report that the first complete inventory reveals surprises. Features that leadership believed were deprecated turn out to still be active. Capabilities that sales had been promising turn out to be only partially implemented. Hidden functionality that was built for a specific customer but never documented becomes visible to the broader team.

This clarity is the starting point for better product decisions. You cannot plan where to go if you do not know where you are.

How does Glue discover features? Glue connects to your code repositories and uses AI to parse functional boundaries, cluster related code into feature groups, and generate plain-language descriptions. The process is continuous, so the inventory stays current as your codebase changes.

What is feature discovery? Feature discovery is the process of identifying and cataloging every capability your software product offers by analyzing the actual codebase rather than relying on documentation or team memory. It produces a structured inventory that reflects what your product truly does today.

Can Glue inventory our entire codebase? Yes. Glue is designed to work with full production codebases across multiple repositories. It handles monorepos, microservices, and polyglot stacks. The analysis scales with your codebase and updates automatically as code changes.